Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, Whitechapel Gallery - exhibition review
Chris Marker, who died in 2012, was little known publicly but remains revered by film-makers from young video artists to Terry Gilliam and James Cameron. The Frenchman was best known for pioneering the "essay film", a kind of documentary with added lyricism and abstraction, but, as this exhibition shows, he was dizzyingly diverse.
He was as likely to create a film such as Ouvroir (2012) in Second Life, in which Guillaume-en-Égypte, his ginger tomcat alter ego, welcomes us to a virtual museum, as he was to create a poetic, collaged travelogue such as Sans Soleil (1983), or a film about socialist ideals and realities composed from found footage in 1973’s A Grin Without a Cat.
The Whitechapel takes a brave stab at reflecting this breadth but many are long films, and you can’t ask gallery-goers to spend whole days in an exhibition, so some are shown in full, like his post-apocalyptic masterpiece La Jetée (1962) while others, like Sans Soleil, are too briefly excerpted.
The show teems with fascinating imagery and ideas, and undoubtedly conjures Marker’s restless spirit but it feels too sprawling and begs the question whether a career dominated by long-form film can be satisfyingly contained within an exhibition format.
Until June 22 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)
